4 ms·

I never did get what the Briefcase was supposed to do. It was so poorly explained that that was it's purpose. Perhaps because I didn't have any networked comput

• helmholtz 6y ago
  Completely off-topic rant incoming, but Microsoft has very often sucked at advertising itself. Here's a more recent example. I bought a Windows Phone way back when. It was amazing. My favourite feature of it, believe it or not, was the keyboard. I have a sneaky suspicion that they used MS Word's dictionary somehow, because it could correct typos not just when the wrong letter was typed (for instance, typing 'aentence' instead of 'sentence'), but also words typed in the wrong order ('snetence'). It was delightful. I could type as fast as I wanted, confident that auto-correct would take care of any errors. Then I moved to Android, and I could not believe how appalling the keyboard was. But it seems that no one else was talking about it, because android users just didn't know of the excellence that existed out there. Then, at some point, Microsoft went ahead and ruined their keyboard when they went to Windows Phone 10 or 8.1 I can't remember, and I've been searching for perfection ever since. GBoard, with it's fucking emoji page is an affront to engineering.
  • toast0 6y ago
    > Then, at some point, Microsoft went ahead and ruined When Microsoft does things like this, and it's not clearly a dumb product decision, it's often to avoid a patent that they don't want to license or fight. I've been using 'simple keyboard' on Android, because it's just a g-d keyboard, but it doesn't do good spell check either. I didn't particularly notice spell check getting worse when I left windows phone, but there was a lot of other stuff going on.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    >....but Microsoft has very often sucked at advertising itself. The MS team that did Clippy would like to have a word with you...
• marcosdumay 6y ago
  If I remember it correctly, the briefcase was able to synchronize by floppy. It was an awesome piece of software, that nobody knew about.
  • throwaway201103 6y ago
    Yes the idea was that you'd have files that you wanted to use on different computers (e.g. at work office and at home). At the end of the work day you'd sync the files to floppy, take the floppy home, and sync it to your home machine. Remember at the time many people did not have laptops. They often didn't have home internet either. Maybe they had AOL, or maybe nothing. They also didn't have a work VPN or any way to access files on their work computer.
  • londons_explore 6y ago
    It was also a good 'lock in'. If your work used Windows, you needed Windows at home too to be able to use Briefcase.